A Sketch of the Life and Character of Daniel Boone

Houston's Boone is a diminutive book but one brimming with contemporary insights plus editor's annotations into frontier life featuring new stuff on Boone, hide tanning, buffalo, Indians, and early hunter anecdotes. An elegent little book with a gorgeous jacket, a highly collectable bit of old-time Kentuckiana.

Murray State University (Kentucky) history professor Ted Franklin Belue discovered the only known copy of Peter Houston's manuscript about his personal recollections of the famous frontiersman, Daniel Boone, in the Lyman C. Draper papers at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin in 1990. Written in the 1840s by a friend and neighbor of Boone's, the original manuscript was stolen from the author's grandson in 1887, but luckily for future historians, the grandson had, mere weeks before the theft, mailed a copy of the lengthy work to the prolific historian, Lyman Draper. Belue has done a masterful job in presenting this rare piece of Americana to the reading public. Replete with extensive annotations and notes, a pictorial section, and an impressive bibliography, the book goes a long way in shedding light on everyday times on America's first western frontier during the 1770s and 1780s. For those of WWA's membership who believe, as I do, that "western" writing is defined as that which encompasses the entire American frontier experience, from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific shores, this book will provide several hours of interesting reading, indeed.--Jim Crutchfield, Managing Editor, Roundup Magazine April 1998, Western Writers of America

Long ago Peter Houston's A Sketch in the Life and Character of Daniel Boone should have been properly annotated and published. Ted Franklin Belue has done historians a genuinely useful service in transcribing into a readily available and readable form this insightful contemporary view of Daniel Boone and the times. This is an addition to the Daniel Boone-Frontier America story, casting a new first-hand and contemporary light on the subject. Dr. Thomas D. Clark, Historian Laureate of Kentucky, professor emeritus of the University of Kentucky, and author of many books on Kentucky and the American South.